Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#

https://nockawa.github.io/blog/why-building-database-engine-in-csharp/

by vyrotek • 3 months ago

66 43 3 months ago

nockawa.github.io

jaen• 3 months ago

C# is a great language with almost unlimited power and great ergonomics (as the article shows), but the .NET CLR (runtime) is a bit overcomplicated with a distinct "Java smell", and packaging and distribution is still meh.

If they could make the developer experience similar to Go, it would rule the world...

karmakaze• 3 months ago

I drank the Go kool-aid, then tried to do some high performance things the Go way: didn't work (channels are slow) and I got over it. Still think Go is great for web backends and the like with production grade stdlib.

Great post with details, not a I'm vibe coding...

benterix2• 3 months ago

tried to do some high performance things the Go way: didn't work (channels are slow) and I got over it.

What did you choose instead?

Rohansi5• 3 months ago

If they could make the developer experience similar to Go, it would rule the world...

You can already AOT compile .NET software to an executable to run on whichever platform you need, just like Go.

Libraries need to be published into a package manager (NuGet) which is more friction than just importing from Git repos but it's not that bad.

hnrodey2• 3 months ago

AOT is not a panacea and comes with some restrictions/trade-offs that need understood before depending on it in production.

Rohansi5• 3 months ago

shaddap

landl0rd2• 3 months ago

I actually really like the CLR developer experience next to java ngl. I reach for C# in lieu of java (less J2EE SingletonBeanFactoryManagerInstance slop) but particularly F# is pretty nice to use. Haskell has bad tooling, OCaml is getting better thanks to JaneStreet (and if OxCaml gets wide adoption unboxed types are a big perf win) but if nothing else lack of a Rider-esque debugger is just a big time sink.

tracker1• 3 months ago

Also worth mentioning are VeloxDB and RavenDB, both written in C#. TBF, I haven't used any of them... but aware they exist.

C# is pretty powerful and capable of lower level usage, such as in the examples given... not to mention a pretty nice interop with C-style libraries. It looks like the intent here might be a custom database engine for service integrations... not necessarily a full rdbms in and of itself.

benterix2• 3 months ago

JIT warmup is real. The first call to any method pays the compilation cost. In a database engine, the first transaction after startup shouldn’t be 100x slower than the steady state.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it what aot was supposed to solve?

landl0rd2• 3 months ago

AOT is a little fussy in real-world usage particularly for things like reflection. You can probably force it to work but it may make your code much uglier.

Span<T> is more important for performance TBH JIT warmup isn't a huge issue for a long-running process

CharlieDigital• 3 months ago

    > ...but it may make your code much uglier

Flip side is that if you use more source generation, it may end up making the code more terse/"prettier" where it matters and avoid the reflection hit.

AI agents seem fairly good at generating source generators so there doesn't seem to be a reason to not use them.

sebazzz• 3 months ago

With UnsafeAccessor you can often avoid reflection.

orphea2• 3 months ago

What's fussy about AOT and reflection?

nycdotnet• 3 months ago

In the section “Hardware-accelerated WAL checksums” he explains how the JIT compiles away the hardware support stuff depending on the exact capabilities of the system its on. With AOT you don’t get this - it’s way more coarse like x64 vs ARM

pjc503• 3 months ago

Eh, I don't see that as a huge deal because the first thing the DB has to do is warm up the disk cache, at least for the indexes. Of course the first call is slow.

DeathArrow• 3 months ago

I wonder why he didn't use AOT compiling if he's worried about JIT warmup.

topspin• 3 months ago

It wasn't discussed, so we're left to speculate. If I had to guess, I imagine that the .NET JIT has actual benefits: the variety of architectures has gotten enormous and JIT is likely a performance win after warmup.

zigzag3122• 3 months ago

.NET JIT supports dynamic PGO.

littlecranky67• 3 months ago

My guess is because .NET AoT is not yet optimized and mature enough as JIT. This is known and is on the agenda of Microsoft but it will take time to get there.

nitwit005• 3 months ago

I would be less worried about the GC pause, than the need to reserve some memory for garbage collection. Any reduction in available memory is going to tend to mean a hit to performance.

alex7o• 3 months ago

That seems great, I have seen a few similar dbs written in java that say the same thing, that when written correctly you can get the perf very close to C, but at that point you are just writing C with a different syntax. You don't win on any in the security guarantees, so at that point can we just not build everything in wasm and then we can interface it from both dotnet and the jvm?

zerr2• 3 months ago

I'd say modern C++ is high level and ergonomic enough to stop considering any language with a GC.

drfloyd51• 3 months ago

Does C++ have build in memory management now?

zerr2• 3 months ago

It's a part of the Standard Library - Smart Pointers.

achillesheels• 3 months ago

You do you.

kerblang2• 3 months ago

Am amused that someone feels compelled to justify writing a db in C#. Such conscientiousness!

I'm not sure authors of Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB (and more...?) ever had the slightest twinge of uncertainty about whether a managed memory env would cause far more problems than it fixed, even with less native tooling than in C#. Java bros DGAF

cyberpunk• 3 months ago

Mongo’s c++ isn’t it?

leosanchez• 3 months ago

Yes

kerblang2• 3 months ago

oh. sorry, had a decent excuse for its horribility, now i have less of one.

gwbas1c• 3 months ago

Regarding tradeoffs:

I've been working with C# for most of my career, almost 25 years, since .Net 1.0. One of the huge things that I love about Rust is the lack of a runtime framework. I don't need to figure out how to bundle / ship / install a framework at runtime.

(I also like Cargo better than Nuget, but that's a very subjective opinion.)

Which leads to probably the biggest tradeoff:

Typhon is an embedded...

It's probably hard, (or impossible) to use Typhon outside of the dotnet ecosystem. Granted, it's been years (since the 1.0 days) since I built a .dll that a native application could pull in, there are complications when you "impose" dotnet into an application that isn't dotnet. These don't happen when your library is 100% native, which you get with C/C++/Rust.

pjc503• 3 months ago

I think the developer is specifically targeting running in game engines in Unity, because that's already a C# capable environment.

Personally I'm not worried about the micro optimization, I'm more a "why are you attempting to compete with sqlite" person.

WorldMaker• 3 months ago

One of the huge things that I love about Rust is the lack of a runtime framework. I don't need to figure out how to bundle / ship / install a framework at runtime.

Rust has a runtime, it's just tiny and auto-bundled (for now). Modern .NET's support for self-contained bundling has gotten pretty good. AOT is getting better too, and AOT-ready code (switch Reflection for Source Generators as much as possible, for instance) can do some very heavy treeshaking of the runtime.

Also, yeah native embedding has gotten somewhat easier in recent years depending on the style of API you want to present to native code. Furthermore both Godot and Unity (differently) embed .NET/C# as options in game development. I certainly expect Typhon is primarily targeting Godot and/or (eventually) Unity (when it finishes switching to coreclr to support more of these features) embedding (but maybe also Stride, a fully C# game engine).

InMemoryNet• 3 months ago

We have a pretty fast InMemory Database for .Net as well, named InMemory.Net!

teleforce• 3 months ago

But what about GC pauses

GC is like auto transmission, it's an inevitable natural evolution of programming languages.

I think the future of programming languages will have hybrid modes of GC and manual, similar to today's hybrid auto transmission automatic and manual in state-of-the-art hypercar [1]. I considered D language as pioneer in this innovative approach.

My hypothesis is that GC can be made deterministic like manual memory management, just like how ICE auto industry minimize the manual transmission. Heck, no manual for EV.

Hopefully the new io_uring facility with BPF controlled can enable this deterministic GC [2],[3].

[1] Here’s how Koenigsegg’s new manual/automatic CC850 gearbox work (2025):

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/supercars/heres-how-koenigs...

[2] BPF meets io_uring (2026):

https://lwn.net/Articles/847951/

[3] How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux (2020):

https://www.scylladb.com/2020/05/05/how-io_uring-and-ebpf-wi...

Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#

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